Twitter moves from Rails to Java

gmarwaha.com

8 points·borski··6 comments

"Could this mean that Java is a better platform than Rails for high scalability needs?"

Isn't this very much common knowledge for systems the size of Twitter?

As has been said many times before, this is not really a knock against Rails. It's what allowed them to even get to the point where they need massive rearchitecting.

Wasn't posting it as a knock on rails; simply thought it was interesting since Twitter has been one of Rails' examples of big projects.

Perpetuating this misleading meme: flagged.

Did you even _read_ the article? Even if that is the case, for simpler scenarios, the beauty of RoR out-weighs Java’s performance.

Indeed, which is no doubt why Twitter is still using Rails.

The sad thing is that there is an interesting tech story in this recent change in the Twitter Search architecture - "large company moves from synchronous web framework to asynchronous I/O and workflow framework" - but it's getting no discussion, because everyone is misreading Twitter's blog post as another chapter in the "Rails doesn't scale" non-story.

There are interesting discussions to be had about language beauty and performance, but this story is not part of them. (Indeed the closest the Twitter post comes to discussing beauty is saying how their old Rails codebase was full of technical debt.)

Read the original blog post [1] on the Twitter engineering blog - which the author of this article clearly didn't - for the real story, which is not about language wars, but about scaling a non-traditional web app.

[1] http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now...

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